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PREACHING THE HOLY GHOST: JOHN DONNE’S WHITSUNDAY SERMONS
Hugh Adlington
This essay takes as its subject the ten extant Whitsunday sermons preached by John
Donne in the period 1618-1630. Whilst the chronology of Donne’s Whitsunday sermons
remains speculative, the occasion, Pentecost, is not in doubt.1 Since the early Christian
church Pentecost has commemorated the descent of the Holy Spirit at Shavuot. 2 From the
fifth century, Christian sermons at Pentecost have drawn on the rabbinical association of
Shavuot with the law-giving of Sinai in order to relate the new covenant of the Spirit to
the old covenant of the Law.
Each of the seven3 biblical texts selected by Donne for his Whitsunday sermons refers
directly to the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Taken as a group, the ten sermons
provide us with a substantial insight into Donne’s theological understanding of the Holy
Ghost.4 However, the Whitsunday sermons also exhibit Donne’s oratorical imitation of
scriptural eloquence, the rhetorical ‘style’ of the Holy Ghost. This imitation, in turn,
derives from the persistent and explicit analogy made by Donne between the office,
action and purpose of the Holy Ghost and those of the Christian preacher. My effort in
this paper is to understand the rhetorical and theological aspects of that analogy.
The Analogy of the Holy Ghost and the Preacher
In what is thought to be the earliest of John Donne’s Whitsunday sermons, preached
to the benchers of Lincoln’s Inn in 1618, Donne observes:
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And as the Trinity is the most mysterious piece of our Religion, and
hardest to be comprehended, So in the Trinity, the Holy Ghost is the most
mysterious person, and hardest to be expressed. [V, 46]
The nature of the third person of the Trinity and its relation to the other two persons,
the Father and the Son, lies at the heart of Donne’s Whitsunday sermons. Jeffrey Johnson
suggests that for Donne the mystery of the structure of the Trinity is Regula Fidei, the
rule of Christian faith. “As his first principle, the doctrine of the Trinity informs every
aspect of Donne’s religious thought.”5
In a number of Whitsunday sermons Donne takes the first mention of the Trinity to be
Genesis 1.1 where the Hebrew text states that “Bara Elohim, That Gods, Gods in the
plurall…made heaven and earth.” [IX, 92] Evident here is the importance of grammar to
Donne’s theology, wherein a grammatical plural of the Hebrew word for God must
necessarily imply a plural form of the Godhead, a Trinity. But how does the Holy Ghost
proceed from a Trinitarian God?
In attempting to illustrate the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Godhead Donne
characteristically adopts three ‘natural’, concrete images – messenger, tree and sun – to
flesh out a theological abstraction:
This is that Spirit, who though hee were to be sent by the Father, and sent
by the Son, yet he comes not as a Messenger from a Superiour, for hee was
alwaies equall to Father and Son: But the Father sent him, and the Son sent
him, as a tree sends forth blossomes, and as those blossomes send forth a
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sweet smell, and as the Sun sends forth beames, by an emanation from it
selfe; [IX, 240]
For this conception of the co-equal Trinity Donne draws upon an array of theological
sources, including Church Fathers such as Tertullian, Basil and John Chrysostom,
scholastics such as Bernard and Aquinas, and Reform theologians such as Calvin and
Beza. However, the predominant influence on Donne’s Trinitarian theology is Augustine,
references to whom far outnumber any other source in the sermons.
In his Whitsunday sermon of 1629 Donne makes the further connection, through
Augustine, to the Neoplatonic influence on De Trinitate:
And to that S. Augustine comes so neare, as to say…That this Spirit of
God may be that universall power, which sustaines, and inanimates the
whole world, which the Platoniques have called the Soule of the world, [IX,
96-7]
John J. O’Meara, in exploring the character of Augustine’s theology, argues that the
triune divinity (One, Nous, World Soul) and doctrine of salvation of Porphyrian
Neoplatonism form the background to Christian Trinitarianism.6 This Porphyrian legacy
is made plain by Donne in his Whitsunday sermon of 1628:
Porphyry that denies the Trinity, is convinced by S. Cyril, to have
established a Trinity, because he acknowledged first Deum summum, and
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then Conditorem omnium, and after them, Animam mundi; One that is a
supream God, One that was the Creator of all things, and One that quickens
and inanimates all, and is the soul of the whole world: And this soul of the
world is the Holy Ghost, [VIII, 259-60]
But perhaps the clearest inheritance owed by Donne to Augustine, and he in turn to
Porphyrian Neoplatonism,7 is the search for intelligible, earthly analogues of Father, Son,
and Holy Ghost.8 In this respect Donne follows Augustine (and Bernard) in recognising
the Vestigia Trinitatis in the tripartite form of the rational soul:
Let us therefore, with S. Bernard, consider Trinitatem Creatricem and
Trinitatem Creatam, A Creating, and a Created Trinity; A Trinity, which the
Trinity in Heaven, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, hath created in our soules,
Reason, Memory, and Will. [III, 144-45]
Significantly, however, Donne differs from Augustine’s association of human
faculties with the Trinity. Whereas Augustine’s formulation associates Memory with the
Father, Understanding with the Son, and Will (or Love) with the Holy Ghost, Donne
holds that Understanding, Will and Memory are linked respectively to Father, Son and
Holy Ghost. For Donne, memory is the human faculty most closely allied with the action
of the Holy Ghost, which “is to gather, to establish, to illumine” [IX, 92]. Once learned,
God stays in the memory.
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Turning from the person to the office of the Holy Ghost, we find in the Whitsunday
sermons an array of roles assigned to the third person of the Trinity. As well as Holy
Ghost and Spirit, Donne also refers variously to the Voyce, Verbum Dei, Dove,
Comforter, Reprover, Witness, Teacher, Tongue and Legatum Christi. No matter the
guise, however, Donne’s interpretation of the Holy Ghost remains consistent throughout;
namely, that the third person of the Trinity is the author and communicator of scriptural
knowledge.
S. Basil …calls the Holy Ghost Verbum Dei, The word of God, because
he undertakes the Pedagogy of the soul, to be the soules School-master,
[VIII, 260]
On the occasion of Pentecost the Holy Ghost is sent as evangelical teacher so that the
Apostles may in turn become teachers and testify to Christ: “then he came in the form of
Tongues, and they that received him, were thereby presently enabled to speak to others.”
[VIII, 260] On Whitsunday, the Holy Ghost’s cultivation of the eloquence of Church
ministers is a simulacrum of the Pentecostal descent of the Spirit, “So the Holy Ghost
leads and places the words, and sentences of the Preacher”. [V, 40]9
The teaching of scriptural knowledge is opposed in Donne’s sermons to a particular
kind of ignorance, the overconfidence of “the foole…that trusteth in his own heart.” This
kind of knowledge, which is sceptical in character and ‘doubts wisely’, is also opposed
by Donne to inconsideration, “a stupid passing him [God] over” [IX, 236].
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The sceptical character of Donne’s epistemology in the Whitsunday sermons almost
certainly owes something to Montaigne, whose Essais were first translated into English
by John Florio in 1603. Dominic Baker-Smith, in tracing the debt of the English Church
to humanism, compares Donne’s ‘doubting wisely’ to that of Montaigne, “who wished to
ally Christ’s teachings with the scepticism of Pyrrho.”10
Donne’s sceptical attitude, ‘to stand inquiring right’, can also be linked directly to the
concept of via media outlined by such Henrician apologists as Thomas Starkey and John
Bekinshaw, and fulfilled in Richard Hooker.11 According to this tradition, knowledge
sought through sensitive discrimination and intellectual ascesis is not contradictory to a
Pauline emphasis on justifying faith:
For though in that sense of which we spoke, Fides justificat sola, Only
faith do justifie, yet it is not true in any sense, Fides est sola, that there is
any faith, where there is nothing but faith. [VII, 228-29]
This necessity of balancing faith and reason is a significant aspect of Donne’s
identification of the Holy Ghost as educator, in distinction to the ‘power’ and ‘love’
embodied in the Father and Son respectively. Also, this same trinity of faculties - power,
love and knowledge – must necessarily be incarnate in human terms, in man redeemed by
Christ: “By power, love, knowledge bee, / Give mee a such selfe different instinct / Of
these let all mee elemented bee, / Of power, to love, to know, you unnumbered three.”12
So far we have established the person of the Holy Ghost, as the co-eternal, codependent third person of the Trinity, and the office of the Holy Ghost, as communicator
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of scriptural knowledge. Now we turn to the question of how this communication of
knowledge is achieved, the action of the Holy Ghost. In his Whitsunday sermon of 1625
Donne establishes that the Holy Ghost’s action, which is communication of scriptural
knowledge, works in a twofold manner:
And therefore, in this capacity, as The Comforter, we must consider his
action, Arguet, He shall reprove; Reprove, and yet Comfort; nay, therefore
comfort, because reprove: [VI, 312]
In his 1627 Whitsunday sermon Donne elaborates on this dual action, referring to the
Spirit’s ‘cloven tongue’ (Acts 2.1) to illustrate how the Holy Ghost simultaneously
reproves and consoles. In an earlier sermon (1618) Donne turns to metaphors of
representation, of printing and painting, to demonstrate how knowledge – reproof and
consolation - is communicated or inspired by the Holy Ghost:
But when the holy Ghost takes a man into his schoole, he deals not with
him, as Painter, which makes an eye, and an eare, and a lip, and passes his
pencill an hundred times over every muscle, and every haire, and so in
many sittings makes up one man, but he deales as a Printer, that in one
straine delivers a whole story. [V, 38]
Later, however, in his Whitsunday sermon of 1630 Donne is careful to distinguish
between the instant transmission of knowledge received by the Apostles, “as from a print,
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from a stampe, all at once,” and the more painstaking communication his congregation
can expect to receive, “as by writing, letter after letter, syllable after syllable, by
catechismes, and Sermons”. This connection, between the scriptural descent of the spirit
on the Apostles and the annual ecclesiastical celebration of Pentecost, Donne finds
embodied in the sacraments of the Church. It is ‘in his Ordinance’, in the reproof and
consolation of the Holy Ghost, that the religious trinity of God, man, and Church is
bound together:
For, As when Peter spake, the holy Ghost fell upon all that heard, So in
the Ministery of his weaker instruments, he conveyes, and diffuses, and
seales his gifts upon all, which come well disposed to the receiving of him,
in his Ordinance. [VI, 131]
Donne’s discussion of the ‘sacramental’ action of the Holy Ghost necessarily implies
that God works with and on human faculties. The faculties of Understanding, Will and
Memory, therefore, clearly have a role to play in receiving grace. Given that human effort
- learning “by catechismes, and Sermons” - is required in preparing for the reception of
grace, how is that learning best accomplished? For Donne it is memory, Bernard’s
“stomach of the soul”, that enables preparation for salvation through the recollection of
God’s mercies and man’s sins. Donne’s emphasis on learning’s dependence on memory
is Augustinian:
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To learn is nothing else, but by conception to receive, and by marking to
take heed that these those things which the memory did before contain at
random and unarranged, be laid up at hand as it were in that same memory,
where before they lay unknown, scattered, and neglected. [De Trinitate, X,
xi]
In Donne’s Whitsunday sermons the essential value of memory in the action of the
Holy Ghost is the “patterning” of experience. In the Vestigia Trinitatis, for example,
memory enables the discernment of divine activity within remembered events. As A. M.
Guite observes, “Donne shows that the pattern of the whole Bible has an interior
correspondence and reflection in our own memories.”13
Having examined the person, office, and action of the Holy Ghost as they are
presented in Donne’s Whitsunday sermons, we turn to the question of purpose.
Throughout the sermons Donne’s “sanctified worldliness”14 ensures a close attendance to
the practical needs of his congregation. Over-ingenious inquiries into religious mysteries
are repudiated. “In pursuing true knowledge,” Donne remarks, “he is gone a good way,
that knows where to give over.” [IX, 242] Bearing this in mind, Donne is succinct in his
statement of the purpose of the Holy Ghost’s communication of scriptural knowledge:
This knowledge then which we speake of, is to know the end and the way,
Heaven and Christ, The kingdome to which he is gone, and the meanes
which he hath taught us to follow. [IX, 244]
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For Donne, then, the person of the Holy Ghost lies in the Trinity, its office is to
communicate scriptural knowledge and its action is via the memory. The purpose of the
Holy Ghost and by analogy of the Christian preacher is nothing less than Salvation, to
‘make Christians’.
Throughout the Whitsunday sermons Donne draws a persistent analogy between the
office, action and purpose of the Holy Ghost, and those of the Christian preacher. In his
Whitsunday sermon of 1618 Donne uses the simile of a gardener and vine to illustrate the
cultivation of the preacher’s words by the Holy Ghost:
And as a Gardiner takes every bough of a young tree, or of a Vine, and
leads them, and places them against a wall, where they may have most
advantage, and so produce, most, and best fruit: So the Holy Ghost leads
and places the words, and sentences of the Preacher, [V, 40]
In addition, Donne makes it clear that the office of the preacher, as ‘Reprover’,
mirrors that of the Holy Ghost: “…the duties of the Preacher are expressed by the
Apostle, to be these three, To reprove, or convince by argument…; And to exhort, to
rectifie our manners; And to rebuke, to denounce Gods Judgements upon the refractary.”
[V, 41] Furthermore, the preacher’s action, like that of the Holy Ghost, is consummated
via the ordinance of the Church, the ‘ministery of men’: “but to let thee see, that his way
of teaching should be the ministery of men, he came in that organ of speech, the
Tongue.” [VIII, 260]
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Finally, the purpose of the preacher, once again analogous to that of the Holy Ghost,
is set out in Donne’s poem ‘To Mr. Tilman after he had taken orders’ (1618): “How
brave are those, who with their Engine, can / Bring man to heaven, and heaven againe to
man?”15
Analogy as Mimetic Incarnation
The second part of the paper focuses on the nature of the analogy between Holy
Ghost and Christian preacher. Here I suggest that in the Whitsunday sermons, via an
imitative application of scriptural eloquence, Donne achieves a mimetic incarnation of the
office, action and purpose of the Holy Ghost. This application of scriptural eloquence
draws on the typology and animarum ædificatio of Augustinian exegesis. It intends,
Exhortation principally, & Edification, & a holy stirring of religious
affections. [VIII, 95]
Given Donne’s emphasis on preaching, on ‘Exhortation’ and ‘Edification’, how then
do his sermons ‘imitatively’ apply scriptural eloquence? In terms of sermon structure
Donne operates within the contemporary artes concionandi, following theorists such as
Keckermann16 and logician Peter Ramus in beginning the sermons with a proem or
praecognitio textus.17 Having introduced the sermon’s text, the divisio then divides the
text into two or three parts. The divisio is then followed by the amplification of each of its
parts and a sum or application of its doctrines.18
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This conventional sermon structure was used by Donne as the foundation for a
number of structural variations, classed into six main types by Joan Webber. 19 In the
Whitsunday sermons Donne predominantly adopts four structural variations: word-byword interpretation, exegesis, imagistic structure, and merging of the text with the
sermon occasion by developing symbols that apply equally to both. Walter R. Davis
suggests that the exegetical and word-by-word interpretative structures in Donne’s
sermons often approach typological forms “in their unfolding of the senses of the text”.
By contrast, the imagistic and merging of text and occasion structures “are
meditative…since they begin with an image and proceed to transcend it.”20
Donne’s Whitsunday sermon of 1629 on Genesis 1.2 is an example of a sermon that
combines exegetical and word-by-word interpretative structures. The sermon develops its
text into a two-part typology. In the first part the Spirit of God moves on the waters at
Creation; and in the second the Spirit is moved “In figura Baptismi” [IX, 453] to
prefigure the second Creation of the New Testament.
Notably, the figurae Donne chooses for the typology of his sermons typically avoid
ideal types such as Christ preferring instead people “of a ‘middle nature’, above nature
and below grace.”21 Such biblical types include “imperfect and struggling examples”
such as Esther, Paul, Job and David.
If I wash my self in Snow-water, and purge my hands never so cleane, yet
mine own clothes shall make me filthy. (Job 9.30) [VI, 117]
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This preference for a ‘middle nature’ between the extremes of zeal and discretion is
characteristic not only of the structure and dispositio of Donne’s Whitsunday sermons but
also of their elecutio or style. Donne’s rhetorical via media, therefore, founded on
prolepsis, correction, and ‘doubting wisely’ is a simulacrum of his theological
equilibrium between reason and faith.
Rhetorical style, Donne suggests, should be adaptable to the preacher’s subject and
occasion. On certain occasions preachers must adopt the style of “speculatores”,
watchmen who discern and denounce sin. On other occasions preachers must be “tubae”,
trumpets to bring people to the sense of their sins. Further, the preacher must be mindful
of the Augustinian injunction “to Teach, to Delight, to Turne,” for
The style of the Scriptures is a diligent, and an artificial style; and a great
part thereof in a musical, in a metrical, in a measured composition, in verse.
[V, 385]
In the Whitsunday sermons the signature of Donne’s rhetorical ‘music’ is the ‘loose
period’ - “that pattern of associations…the flexible dislocation of the syntactic order,
through elements such as parenthesis, inversion and elliptical phrasing.”22 In his sermon
on Whitsunday 1628 Donne ‘dislocates the syntactic order’ via his adoption of the liquid
metaphor of the ‘dew of Hermon’, illustrating the descent of the Holy Ghost:
The dew of Hermon descends upon the mountaines of Sion; But the
waters that fall upon the mountaines, fall into the valleyes too from thence;
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The Holy Ghost fals, through us, upon you also, so, as that you may, so, as
that you must finde it in your selves. [VIII, 267]
Here, the ‘liquidity’ of Donne’s ‘loose period’ aspires to a rhetorical mimesis of the
Holy Ghost’s descent. The mimesis proceeds via a ‘commatic’ chain of propositions
known by Greek rhetors as “kôla” and “kommata” (clauses and phrases)” and in Latin as
membra et incisa (limbs and pieces). Donne then characteristically elaborates the liquid
metaphor, using the rhetorical scheme of anacoluthon to create a sense of urgency,
shifting in mid-sentence from a less emphatic verbal form, “so that you may”, to a more
emphatic, “so, as that you must”.
Donne then elaborates the liquid metaphor further, making a comparison between the
entry of the Holy Ghost into the human soul and the infusion of liquid into a vessel:
There is an infusion of the holy Ghost; liquor is infused into a vessell, if
that vessell hold it, though it doe but cover the bottom and no more: The
holy Ghost is infused into you, if he have made any entry, if he cover any
part, if he have taken hold of any corrupt affection. [VIII, 269]
Donne’s use of an elemental, ‘natural’ image to illustrate a theological concept, the
descent of the Holy Ghost, deliberately imitates scriptural eloquence. “To [Donne]
concrete images were not realities of perception, but instruments for making ethical truths
aesthetically luminous.”23 Phrasal balance is used to gather associative meaning: “There
is an infusion of the holy Ghost; liquor is infused into a vessell.” Repetition of clause
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structure builds rhythmic intensity: “if he have made any entry, if he cover…, if he have
taken hold…”
Donne takes the liquid metaphor yet further:
There is also a diffusion of the holy Ghost; Liquor is diffused into a
vessell, when it fils all the parts of the vessell, and leaves no emptinesse, no
driness: The holy Ghost is diffused into you, if he overspread you, and
possesse you all, and rectifie all your perversenesses. [VIII, 269]
From an infusion, filling some part of the vessel only, we move to a diffusion, filling
all of the vessel. Repetition of a suffix, in this case ‘-fusion’, is an oft-repeated Donnean
device in the Whitsunday sermons that produces an incantatory effect, justifying Mr.
Chidley’s opinion that “He kept his love but not his object. Wit / He did not banish, but
transplanted it”.24
As Donne draws to the climax of his sermon he brings the liquid analogy to its
natural conclusion:
But then, in the Schoole, we have also an effusion of the holy Ghost; And
liquor is effused then, when it so fils the vessell, as that that overflowes, to
the benefit of them, who will participate thereof. Receive therefore the holy
Ghost, so, as that the holy Ghost may overflow, flow from your example, to
the edification of others; [VIII, 269]
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The anadiplosis of ‘overflow, flow’ epitomises in parvo the overall sense of motion
achieved by Donne’s liquid metaphor. The metaphor is incremental in nature, building up
meanings and associations via a ‘substitutive technique’25 and the rhetorical scheme of
homoeoteleuton, the repetition of the same word-ending. From barely covering the
bottom of the vessel Donne proceeds to the ‘effusive’ image of the overflowing vessel,
analogous to the superabundance of the Holy Ghost.
The evangelical aim of Donne’s elecutio is clear - to make the congregation
themselves: “Salvatores mundi, men that assist the salvation of the world, by the best way
of preaching, an exemplar life, and holy conversation.” [VIII, 269]
The associative relations that proliferate in Donne’s ‘long loose’ sentences offer an
insight into “those operations or perceptual processes which are reflected in interpropositional relationships.”26 ‘Associative’ relations in Donne’s sermons, frequently
arranged in overlapping layered series, are indicative of Donne’s ‘evangelical’ elision of
the border between concrete examples such as falling water, and spiritual concepts such
as the descent of the Holy Ghost.
In his Whitsunday sermon of 1618 Donne focuses his exegesis on that part of the text,
Acts 10.44, that most vividly dramatises the occasion of Pentecost, “The Holy Ghost fell
on all them, which heard the Word.”
…here the Holy Ghost is said to have fallen, which denotes a more
earnest communicating of himselfe, a throwing, a pouring out of himselfe,
upon those, upon whom he falls: He falls as a fall of waters, that covers that
it falls upon; as a Hawk upon a prey, it desires and it will possesse that it
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falls upon; as an Army into a Countrey, it Conquers, and it Governes where
it fals. [V, 49]
Here the familiar rhetorical schemes of anadiplosis and phrasal balance are present
once more. But on this occasion, rather than develop a consistent metaphorical image
such as liquor in a vessel, Donne develops the action of ‘falling’, building an
accumulation of meaning via a succession of images – plunging water, a bird of prey, a
conquering army.
That Donne’s exegesis should focus on action is consistent with his imitation of
scriptural eloquence. “God,” says Donne, “is Logos, Sermo, Verbum, Oratio; The Word,
Saying, Speaking; But God considered primarily in himself so, is Actus purus, all Action,
all doing.” [VIII, 179]27 Scriptural language, therefore, expresses itself primarily as verb
or action because God’s words imply action.28
However, the roles of the preacher and the congregation, in their ‘subjection’ to God,
also contain a strongly passive sense. This is exemplified by the fact that man cannot be
saved without being baptised and receiving the Spirit:
It is true, that S. Cyprian sayes there, That a man is not truly sanctified,
Nisi utroque Sacramento nascatur, Except he be regenerate by both
Sacraments: And he tels us what those two Sacraments are, Aqua &
Spiritus, Water and the Spirit, That except a man have both these seales,
inward and outward, he is not safe: [V, 51-2]
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The grammatical solution to this active-passive paradox of Christ crucified, of man
predestined-yet-free, is in Donne’s choice of verbs. Verbs such as ‘to suffer’, ‘to receive’,
and ‘to hear’, which have active voice forms but passive or middle voice meanings, are
used in both Scripture and Donne’s sermons to convey the spiritual sense of ‘active
passivity’, of man’s submission to God.
In the climactic development of his metaphor of falling Donne uses such verbs in
exhorting his congregation to ‘heare’ and ‘receive’ the Holy Ghost, which is mimetically
incarnated in the words of the preacher. According to the analogy between Holy Ghost
and preacher Donne contrives to ‘rhetorically plummet’, gathering impetus through
repeated negation and increasingly dynamic verbs of downward motion – “He did not
onely hover…He did not onely descend…He fell.” Rapidly switching from images of the
Holy Ghost as breath, as voice, as hawk or dove or angel, Donne concludes in the short
sentence of the style coupé with the abstract yet personalised image of the Holy Spirit
itself.
This was then the effectuall working of the Holy Ghost, Non spiravit, He
did not only breathe upon them, and try whether they would receive the
savour of life unto life, or no: Non sibilavit, He did not onely whisper unto
them, and try whether they had a disposition to heare, and answer; Non
incubabat, He did not onely hover over them, and sit upon them, to try what
he could hatch, and produce out of them; Non descendit, He did not onely
descend towards them, and try whether they would reach out their hand to
receive him; But Cecidit, He fell, so, as that he possessed them, enwrapped
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them, invested them with a penetrating, with a powerfull force; And so, he
fell upon them All. [V, 53]
Analogy as Syllogism
The first part of this paper aimed to establish the analogy in the Whitsunday sermons
between preacher and Holy Ghost. In the second part this analogy was characterised as a
form of mimetic incarnation, the preacher’s imitation of scriptural eloquence in the
exegetical manner of Augustine’s animarum ædificatio. In this final part I wish to show a
further aspect of Donne’s rhetorical imitation of scriptural eloquence. This aspect is
present in the dual function of the Holy Ghost as Comforter, that is to assure and reprove:
…to convince, to prove, to make a thing evident, by undeniable
inferences, and necessary consequences; [VI, 316]
Here, as a necessary complement to Donne’s affective mode of edification we find
Donne’s syllogistic appeal to reason. The use of reason in understanding the revelation of
God’s will in the Scriptures is justified for Donne by the dual connotation of Logos as
word and reason. “The language of the Logos is logic, Donne believes, and redemption
lies the way of that logic.”29
God is Logos, speech and reason: He declares his will by his Word, and
he proves it, he confirmes it; he is Logos, and he proceeds Logically.
…Religion is reason and Logique; The devill hides, and deludes, Almighty
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God demonstrates and proves: That fashion of his goes through all his
precepts, through all his promises, which is in Esay, Come now, and let us
reason together. [V, 103-4]
In his appeal to both faith and reason30 in his sermons Donne’s most frequent model
was St. Paul, whose method was:31
…to proceed by the understanding, to the affections, and so to the
conscience of those that hear him, by such means of perswasion, as are most
appliable to them, to whom he then speaks. [VIII, 160]
What then are the syllogistic “means of perswasion” used by Donne in the sermons?
In his Whitsunday sermon of 1626 on John 16.8-11 Donne aims to show that “all the
world is under sin, and knowes it not.”
As every man hath a devill in himselfe…some particular sin that
transports him, so every man hath a kinde of God in himselfe, such a
conscience, as sometimes reproves him. [VII, 217]
In suggesting that the existence of sin must ipso facto imply the existence of
conscience, Donne argues axiomatically. The axiom in this case is the natural ‘law of
symmetry’ wherein the existence of a thing, such as the devil, necessitates the existence
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of its ‘symmetrical’ opposite, God. Donne then develops this argument-by-antithesis to
suggest a causal moral principle, that sin itself inevitably leads to repentance:
That very sin which hath possessed him, by the excesse of that sin, or, by
some losse, or paine, or shame following that sin, occasions that reproofe
and remorse, that withdraws him from that sin. [VII, 217]
Within Donne’s ‘reasoned’ argument that sin begets its own reproof we can detect the
lex talionis of Judaic rationality. With its rewards for virtue and punishments for vice,
justice in the Old Testament is necessarily rational in its predictive nature. 32 Donne’s
confidence in rationality, in divine justice, is also evident in his ‘propositional’ style, a
series of short, uninflected phrases that proceed by logical deduction to command assent:
The Holy Ghost is sent to Teach; he teaches by speaking; he speaks by his
Ordinance, and Institution in his Church. [VIII, 261]
This series of propositions appears to contain a self-evident logic. Concrete actions
and entities – “teaching…speaking…Ordinance…Church” – stand in for the abstract
concept of the Holy Ghost. Donne’s imitation of scriptural eloquence draws here on the
isotopic relation of grammar to logic. Moving from the passive voice of “is sent” to the
active assertion of “he speaks”, Donne grammatically compels ‘logical’ assent. In this
sense, scriptural language is seen to be inherently rational because inherently
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grammatical. In the context of human morality Donne sees this ‘inherent’ logic as
‘inborn’:
There is no Atheist; They that oppose the true, do yet worship a false god;
and hee that sayes there is no God, doth for all that, set up some God to
himselfe. Every man hath this reproofe borne in him, that he doth ill, that he
offends a God, that he breaks a law when he sins. [VI, 325]
Knowledge of God, then, and knowledge of sin is ‘borne in’ man, it resides in his
memory. Here once more is Donne’s imitation of the scriptural use of the deponent
verb,33 placing man’s relation to God midway between activity and passivity. This
‘midpoint’ is represented in rhetorical terms by Donne’s use of what Winifred Crombie
calls “hypothetical arguments in the form of condition-consequence relations.”34 In
Donne’s 1625 Whitsunday sermon, for example, a cumulative series of five “If”
statements and their consequences, “this is a reproof” [VI, 329], enumerate the ways in
which a person might be in sin. Having established the hypothetical conditions and
consequences of how a person’s sins might merit the reproof of the Holy Ghost, Donne
proceeds to exhort his congregation to:
Reprove they selfe; but doe it by convincing, not by a downe-right
stupefaction of the conscience; but by a consideration of the nature of thy
sin, and a contemplation of the infinite proportion between God and thee,
[VI, 329]
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The accent on ‘convincing’ by reason is conspicuous. In contrast to irrational
‘stupefaction of the conscience’ Donne invites his auditors to consider the ratio, the
spatial, geometrical ‘proportion’ between God and man. This implies that a rational,
mathematical ‘contemplation’ can lead to a ‘rectified’ spiritual knowledge.
Other forms of ‘syllogistic’ argumentation employed by Donne include the resolution
of paradox via axiomatic priority, reductio ad absurdam, and the proof of apparent non
sequiturs. All are used by Donne to advocate the use of reason in receiving the Holy
Ghost.
The division of Donne’s imitation of scriptural eloquence into an ‘affective style’ and
a ‘syllogistic style’ is not meant to suggest a rhetorical antinomy. Rather the opposite in
fact, since both styles draw on the rhetorical analysis of Book IV of Augustine’s De
Doctrina Christiana. The “commatic style” that Augustine found in St. Paul, for instance,
is present in both the phrasal balance of Donne’s meditative elecutio and also in the
antitheses of his ‘logical’ style.
Flexibility of rhetorical style is also evident in Donne’s tempered mode of sermon
presentation. The Holy Ghost’s ‘reproofe’, Donne remarks, is “but Syllogismus, it is but
argument, it is but convincing, it is not destroying; it is not an Inquisition, a prison, a
sword, an axe, a halter, a fire;” [VI, 319] Steering a via media between overly-discreet
proofs that rely on Authority and over-zealous argumentation, Donne urges preachers to
moderation, to take care not to “tread out smoaking flaxe,” nor to “breake a bruised
reed.” [VI, 319]
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Significantly, Donne defines this mode of scriptural eloquence, this ‘golden mean’
between discretion and zeal, in Aristotelian terms. “Elenchus est Syllogismus contra
contraria opinantem; A reproofe, is a proofe, a proofe by way of argument, against
another man, who holds a contrary opinion.” [VI, 317] In Donne’s imitation of the
eloquence of the Holy Ghost, this ‘proofe’, this ‘elenchus’35 proceeds by applying reason
to the awakened memory. The abstract application of reason to memory, analogised in
the Whitsunday sermon of 1625 to the application of grace to the soul, characteristically
for Donne becomes a question of ductility:
Grace doth not ordinarily work upon the stifnesse of the soule, …but
when the soule is soupled and mellowed, and feels this reproofe, …that
remorse becomes as the matter, and grace enters as the form, that becomes
the body, and grace becomes the soule; [VI, 325]
In this third part of the paper we have seen that Donne appeals to reason via elenchus,
or logical argument. This ‘syllogistic’ style, I have suggested, is in keeping with the
preacher’s rhetorical imitation of the office of the Holy Ghost, which is to communicate
scriptural knowledge. Types of rhetorical controversia used in Donne’s syllogistic style
include axiomatic, antithetical, and hypothetical argument, argument via proposition, in
which logic is equated with grammar, resolution of paradox, and reductio ad absurdam.
Lastly I would like to touch on Donne’s theory of res et verba. For in part at least, it
is Donne’s view of the relation between words and things that ‘underwrites’ the analogy
in the Whitsunday sermons between preacher and Holy Ghost.
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Under ordinary circumstances, Donne maintains, words must always be secondary to
‘things’. Res, in this sense, is related to verba as soul is to body. In a sermon on the text
of Philippians 3.2, (“Beware of the concision”), Donne remarks:
Language must waite upon the matter, and words upon things…The
matter, that is, the doctrine we preach, is the forme, that is, the Soule, the
Essence; the language and words wee preach in, is but the Body, but the
existence. [X, 112]
However, to say that matter is more ‘essential’ than language is not to say that the
connection between res et verba is accidental. In the third of Donne’s Prebend sermons,
preached at St. Paul’s in 1626, Donne observes that “Adam gave every Creature the
Name, according as he saw the Nature thereof to be.” [VII, 241] Donne observes that
Adam could name the creatures because he knew their essences. The name of a thing,
therefore, springs from its essence. This concept of the unity of res et verba lies at the
heart of the notion of ‘God’s grammar’. Furthermore, Donne’s analogy between Holy
Ghost and preacher, between God and man, implies that having understood ‘God’s
grammar’, we are bound to imitate it.
The underlying logic of God’s grammar, of the Logos, is structured as a trinity. The
three grammatical persons, I, Thou, and It, map the Trinitarian structure of Father, Son,
and Holy Ghost. In the Whitsunday sermons, ‘I’ can be taken to refer to Donne’s
individual rhetorical style; ‘Thou’ to the rhetorical schemes called for by the occasion of
each sermon; and ‘It’ to the matter that is preached, the scriptural text. The result is a
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form of speech in concurrence with scriptural eloquence, the word of God. The Trinity,
Donne states, “is the first letter in his Alphabet, that ever thinks to read his name in the
book of life.” [IX, 51]
Donne’s linguistic ‘theory’ of res et verba also lies at the heart of another Trinitarian
structure in the Whitsunday sermons, the triple ‘knot’ of Scripture, sermon and Church
Ordinance. In his earliest extant Whitsunday sermon, preached at Lincoln’s Inn in 1618,
the ‘dilated, diffused’ interrelations of Word, sermon and Ordinance are defined by
Donne in a series of qualifying propositions:
The Word of God is made a Sermon, that is, a Text is dilated, diffused
into a Sermon; but that whole Sermon is not the word of God. But yet all
the Sermon is the Ordinance of God. [V, 56]
In a sermon preached nine years later in St. Paul’s, on John 14.26, Donne focuses on
refining the structure of the three persons of the Trinity, a refinement that has
implications, as we have seen, for Donne’s view of the structure of language. Donne
refers initially to Basil’s account of the inherent relations of the Trinity, a description
Donne uses in a number of sermons:
S. Basil gives us one interpretation; that is, that one principall name of
Christ belongs to the Holy Ghost. For Christ is Verbum, The Word, and so
is the Holy Ghost, sayes that Father, Quia interpres filii, sicut filius patris,
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Because as the Son manifested the Father, so the Holy Ghost manifests the
Son; [VII, 448]
However, Donne is not quite satisfied with Basil’s interpretation. The semantic
problem that Donne senses, I suggest, lies with the word ‘manifested’. As a description of
the relation between the persons in the Trinity, ‘manifestation’ is at one remove from the
idea of ‘incarnation’. From the Latin manifestus, literally ‘that is grasped by the hand’,
‘manifested’ conveys the sense of a distance between two connected entities, something
‘out there’.
In refining his definition of Trinitarian relations Donne turns inevitably to his
strongest patristic influence:
S. Augustine gives another sense; Societas Patris & Filii, est Spiritus
Sanctus, The Holy Ghost is the union of the Father and the Son. As the
body is not the man, nor the soul is not the man, but the union of the soul
and body…; so the union of the Father and Son to one another, and of both
to us, by the Holy Ghost, makes up the body of the Christian Religion. And
so, this interpretation of S. Augustine, comes neare to the fulnesse, in what
sense the Holy Ghost came in Christs name. [VII, 448]
In Augustine’s interpretation ‘manifested’ has been replaced with ‘union’. Union, in
contrast to ‘manifests’, denotes unity, incarnation, the three-in-one of the Trinity. This
emphasis on ‘union’ rather than on ‘manifestation’ is informed by Donne’s view of the
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scriptural name of a thing springing from its essence. In the relation between God and
man this Trinitarian ‘union’ is typologically ‘dilated’ into concrete, human structures,
“The holy Ghost shall fall upon you…and make your domestique peace there, a type of
your union with God in heaven;” [V, 56-7]
Similarly, this Augustinian ‘union’ characterises Donne’s kerygma, his ‘incarnation’
of the Holy Ghost in the Whitsunday sermons. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are thus
present ‘in the preaching thereof’, the preaching that “conveys, diffuses, and seals” in its
effort to emulate the function of scriptural eloquence, which is to “actuate, fecundate, and
generate” the congregation’s disposition to receive the Holy Spirit. [VI, 5]
So Donne’s theology and rhetoric, (and by extension his ecclesiology and politics),
hang on a word. Instead of an ‘analogy’ between Holy Ghost and preacher, between res
et verba, Donne gives us ‘an union’: “…for this [Pentecost] is an union, in which, Christ
in his purpose hath married himself to our souls,” [IX, 248] Given Donne’s legal training,
his knowledge of casuistry, and his philological inclination, perhaps we should not be
surprised by the grammatical nature of his exegesis:
I know it is a good rule, that Damascen gives…Parva, parva non sunt, ex
quibus magna proveniunt: Nothing is to be neglected as little, from which
great things may arise. [IX, 70]
King’s College London
Notes
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1
Dates for just three of Donne’s Whitsunday sermons are supplied by the folios (1627-
1629). For the conjectural chronology of the remaining seven see The Sermons of John
Donne, eds., George Potter and Evelyn Simpson, (Univ. of California Press, 1953-62),
Vol. V, pp. 4-6. All quotations, volume and page numbers, are from this edition.
2
Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, was a Jewish pilgrimage festival held seven weeks after
Passover to mark the end of the grain harvest (Lev. 23.9-22).
3
Two texts are repeated: John 16.8-11 in 1625-26, and John 14.26 in 1627-28.
4
See the following for discussion of Donne’s ‘moderate Calvinism’: Jeffrey Johnson,
The Theology of John Donne, (Boydell & Brewer, 1999); Daniel W. Doerksen,
“Preaching Pastor versus Custodian of Order,” Philological Quarterly, Vol. 73, No. 4,
(Fall, 1994), pp. 417-29; Paul R. Sellin, John Donne and ‘Calvinist’ Views of Grace, (VU
Boekhandel Uitgeverij, 1983).
5
Jeffrey Johnson, The Theology of John Donne, p. x.
6
“The Neoplatonism of Saint Augustine,” in Neoplatonism and Christian Thought, ed.,
Dominic O’Meara, (International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, 1982), p. 36.
7
See Mary T. Clark, “A Neoplatonic Commentary on the Christian Trinity: Marius
Victorinus,” in Neoplatonism and Christian Thought, p. 30.
8
See Stephen McKenna, St. Augustine, The Trinity, (CUA Press, 1963), p. xv.
9
For the conjunction of Holy Ghost and preacher see also Andreas Hyperius, The Practis
of Preaching, otherwise called the Pathway to the Pulpet, (1577), p. 8.
10
“John Donne’s Critique of True Religion,” in John Donne: Essays in Celebration, ed.,
A. J. Smith, (Methuen and Co. Ltd, 1972), p. 408.
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11
Donne’s via media between faith and reason is also indebted to ‘radical Catholic’
divines such as Georgius Cassander and Fra Paolo Sarpi.
12
The Litanie, stanza IV, ‘The Trinity’, in The Complete English Poems of John Donne,
ed. C. A. Patrides, (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1985), p. 458.
13
A. M. Guite, “The Art of Memory and the Art of Salvation,” Seventeenth Century, Vol.
4, No. 1, (1989), p. 12.
14
Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England 1603-1690, (Princeton Univ. Press,
1975), p. 151.
15
The Complete English Poems of John Donne, p. 471.
16
See Keckermann, Rheticae ecclesiasticae, (1606).
17
See Winfried Schleiner, The Imagery of John Donne’s Sermons, (Brown Univ. Press,
1970). See also William Mueller, John Donne: Preacher, (Princeton, 1962), pp. 89-99.
18
See W. Fraser Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson: A Study of
its Literary Aspects, (1932; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), pp. 93-101.
19
Joan Webber, Contrary Music: The Prose Style of John Donne, (Univ. of Wisconsin
Press, 1963), p. 165.
20
Walter R. Davis, “Meditation, Typology, and the Structure of John Donne’s Sermons,”
in The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne, eds., Claude J. Summers and TedLarry Pebworth, (Columbia, 1986), p. 166.
21
Nancy Wright, “The Figura of the Martyr in John Donne’s Sermons,” in John Donne,
New Casebooks, ed., Andrew Mousley, (Macmillan Press Ltd, 1999), p. 66.
22
A. C. Partridge, John Donne: Language and Style, (Andre Deutsch, 1978), p. 223.
23
Ibid., p. 227.
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24
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, (London, William Pickering, 1840), p. xlvi.
25
Winfried Schleiner, The Imagery of John Donne’s Sermons, p. 203.
26
Winifred Crombie, Free Verse and Prose Style, (Croom Helm, 1987), p. 146.
27
Heather Asals, “John Donne and the Grammar of Redemption,” English Studies in
Canada, Vol. 5, No. 2, (Summer, 1979), p. 128.
28
For a seventeenth century view of God as ‘verb’ rather than ‘noun’, see Andreas
Guarana, The Grammar Warre, (London, 1635).
29
30
Heather Asals, “John Donne and the Grammar of Redemption,” p. 133.
For the influence on Donne’s theology of Aquinas, Ockham and Gerson see Louis I.
Bredvold, “The Religious Thought of Donne in Relation to Medieval and Later
Traditions,” in Studies in Shakespeare, Milton and Donne, Vol. 197, (Macmillan & Co,
1925), p. 205.
31
Paul W. Harland, “Imagination and the Affections in John Donne’s Preaching,” John
Donne Journal, Vol. 6, No. 1, (1987), p. 42.
32
See George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, (Faber and Faber Ltd, 1961), pp. 4-6.
33
‘Deponent’ in the sense that to ‘be born’ takes a passive voice form but has an active
voice meaning.
34
Winifred Crombie, Free Verse and Prose Style, p. 138.
35
The etymology of ‘elenchus’ – a logical refutation, via Latin from Greek elenchein, to
shame, reveals the single root of the dual aspects, moral (shame) and legal (logic), of ‘the
Reprover’, the Holy Ghost.
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